– A $10 million federal grant is heading to the Lehigh Valley's community colleges to help the schools better prepare the next generation of welders, health care administrators and machine-repair workers.

The grant money announced Monday is part of a national program to help community colleges team up with employers to ensure that their graduates have the skills companies are looking for.

Officials at Northampton Community College, the lead applicant for the grant with Lehigh Carbon Community College and Luzerne County Community College, say the grant money will allow them to create new, targeted programs for high-demand industries that have seen rapid changes.

"We're responding to what the new needs are," Northampton Community College President Mark Erickson said Monday. "The needs of health care have changed, and the same with manufacturing. This [grant] is kind of a boost in the arm to amplify things that we're already doing."

The trio of eastern Pennsylvania colleges were the only commonwealth schools to receive money in this latest round of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training competitive grant program. Northampton and Lehigh Carbon also received money from a 2011 award that was divided among 14 Pennsylvania schools.

Some 270 community colleges across the country will receive a total of $450 million in grant money to expand and improve educational and career training programs. Vice President Joe Biden formally announced the award winners Monday morning with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez.

Biden and President Barack Obama touted the grant competition in April during an event at the Community College of Allegheny County.

At Northampton Community College and its partner campuses, the four-year, $10 million grant will be used to craft new certificate and degree programs in the areas of health care, advanced manufacturing, and transportation and logistics.

Erickson said the schools will work closely with local businesses on what the curriculum for each new program should include. Those companies also may provide some lecturers and likely will have some of their employees enroll in the training programs.

The money will be used both to develop the new programs, which will take a year to 18 months, and to market them, Erickson said. He added that some people still hold outdated views of manufacturing that don't reflect the field's highly technical aspects.

At Monday's award ceremony, Biden — whose wife teaches at Northern Virginia Community College — and Perez praised the nation's community colleges as adaptive institutions that play an important role in making sure there's a steady flow of highly skilled workers.

That training is more vital than ever before, Perez said. He recalled how when he was growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., someone with a high-school education "could punch [a] ticket to the middle class at Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, the Ford stamping plant, Harrison Radiator or any other number of places, but today's a different world."

Many middle-class Americans continue to struggle and tens of thousands of jobs go unfilled because workers lack the right skills, Biden said. The vice president said the new relationships being created between community colleges and businesses will help prepare more workers for those high-paying jobs.

"These partnerships provide a seamless transition so folks can move from the classroom directly into a job you can raise a family on," he said. "…It's transformative. It's good for workers, it's good for business, it's good for the economy."